Raithe

Giving Far Cry 2 a try after picking it up in the Steam sale. Hm, some interesting, but I'm beginning to get a bit tired of every mission making you spend 15 minutes travelling to get to an objective. It's being annoyingly grindy to get anywhere to do stuff. Sure, it looks fairly pretty.. but winding roads, tiresome off road, and the same 2 guys in a gunned up jeep turning up gets a bit samey.

Decided to catch a copy of Far Cry 2 for some general shooty urges. Edit: How is Dark Souls on a mouse and keyboard setting?

Well, with a bit of effort I could probably name them. Probably get the North/South divide right. But I wouldn't be certain of getting them in exactly the right geographical locations.. But it's one of those pieces of general knowledge that you rarely have to actually exercise. And it's not as if at any point in your schooling we get sat down and taught American states. Geography lessons will point out "This is the US, this is Canada, this is Mexico" etc.. but there's little point in breaking it down further for most people on this side of the pond... We get exposed to various cities in exported US tv shows, but how often do they make particular note of which States they happen to be in? I guess with the European countries it makes more sense to recognise them due to all of the global politics and news aspects of it all. Then again, I grew up with the news over Yugoslavia breaking up, and the Glasnost period and the USSR breaking apart. So it was more relevant to being "on my awareness" as it were.

Because it worked so damn well.. http://youtu.be/FPoBgW-3ysM

Happy Birthday.. Celebrate that growth into...adulthood and the continuing milestones that societal pressure says you should have reached by now that you've never bothered with..

Person of Interest. The opening montage with Cash's rendition of "Hurt" worked damn well. And that ending conversation from Elias on the nature of civilised man and debts... Before the "Me? Kill you? No. I'm not going to kill you. My friend is going to kill you. I'm just going to watch."

To add further joys, I've been told it's Windows 8 on some Dell laptop. I foresee fun to be had...,

Virus scan, uninstall tool bars, re-enable user-disabled virus software, tell them to stop disabling the software you put on to protect their machine, leave, get called two weeks later, rinse, repeat. Yup. That's the standard. I tend to include throwing on CCleaner and running that through as well.

My sister volunteered me as tech support to one of her friends, so looks like I'm going to spend a chunk of my evening trying to fix a laptop from some unnamed problem while their kids dance around impatiently.

Of course, the moment the Scots do get Independence and stop wanting to argue with the English they'll go back to what they historically did before we got involved. Argue and fight amongst themselves..

All that money they pour into providing cheaper University access does produce Engineers and Scientists and there's a large chunk that go into the Armed Forces.

One thing that's hitting here is they're shutting down chunks of the naval construction in Portsmouth. In this vital moment when certain folks are pushing for Scottish Independence.. The Government is cancelling contracts down south to give all the Royal Navy construction to Scottish companies. I guess I'm wondering if the whole, make people unemployed down here as a side-effect for trying to increase good thoughts from Scotland is a planned out thing...

Well the reason why God made England so small... because otherwise we would have conquered the whole bloody world. Not just the 3/4's of it that we did..

I do think we're better together then apart, but I'm also annoyed at a lot of this. One of the reports that came out a couple of weeks back had the whole "amount of tax money spent per head" in the country. And frankly, the Scots have the most tax money spent on them, followed by the Welsh, then the Irish (Northern Ireland) and the English have the lowest. The Scots have incredibly low costs for their Universities because of government subsidies not available down south, they get free prescriptions of advanced drugs that are considered "too expensive" to be used by the NHS in England, and they get all that from the taxes of the UK as a whole. So to have them waving the banner over how we're sucking tax money out of Scotland and they'll be better off and wealthier without the rest of the UK.. does get a wee bit irritating.

In relation to that colonial holiday thing... Forbes - How Small Businesses Can Win on Security and Speed this Cyber-Monday

Okay, just puttering around on steam and I note the assorted AC4 dlc. Seriously? They're selling "Time Saver DLC".. that, shows you where all the collectibles are, gives you resources before they become available in the game, and.. let you build stuff without having to go to the trouble of playing the game and finding the plans.. The mind is boggled. "I'm going to pay £40 for a game, and then I'm going to pay even more money because I don't want to spend my time playing that game..." Now I'm feeling like a crotchety old gamer who doesn't understand the current generation.

Heh. I enjoyed the hell out of the "Enter the Dominatrix" DLC.

Sky News - Scottish Independence Blue Print Okay, maybe I'm being a bit biased, but with the amount of Scots in the past few government cabinets for the UK, and the mount of tax money that gets spent to provide all sorts of benefits and University tuition up north... If they go independent as they plan will they really be better off? Will it mean we stop having them interfering with our government down south?

It's also an interesting thing, that the "professional" actor (whether voice, screen or stage) has changed a lot over the years. It used to be that you HAD to overact for the audience to "get" what was going on, the wide gestures to make sure that the people in the back row would pick up the details.. It's grown more subtle as time and media has moved on. With animation, the voice has to carry more effect then when you can see a human face and get the body language and expressions to help gauge the subtleties. During the 80's, animation just wasn't up to snuff so voice actors tended to be a bit more.. bombastic shall we say? The better the animation gets, the more subtle the performance of the voice actors can become.

Realised how old my 'Complete HTML Reference' book is when it starts mentioning Netscape Navigator....

Home-made seafood couscous.

On my mother's side, we have a blind albino basketweaver who was invited onto the national chess team - but refused because it would take too much time away from the family, and who had a basket he made actually given to the Queen as a birthday present. So likely tucked away in some nook in the Palace...

Hm, woke up from some odd dreams where I was deconstructing the Hunger Games trilogy (the books) and tallying good and bad aspects. Then had the haze into consciousness mixing the "wtf hunger games?!!" and trying to decide if it was Sunday or Monday...

Hm, where do you find the force ghost on Ilum? and the magenta crystal recipes these days? I've been working on my post 50 artifice recipes with my SI now that I've got it up to 450 skill, have a bunch of blue and purple enhancements now, even a few hilt recipes like that, but I've noticed there don't seem to be any crystal recipes for that.. Just the +41 Critical/Power that have been around for aaaages. Tried out the group finder for a bit over the weekend, and kept getting sent to the Czerka Labs and Meltdown. Seem's the [Hard] 50 flashpoints just don't turn up, although I did find out what [Hard] 55 Hammer Station is like....

Heh. The Five(ish) Doctors